


what makes the desert beautiful

by ThirtySixSaveFiles



Category: Persona 5
Genre: Alternate Universe - The Little Prince, Chess, Fairy Tale Retellings, M/M, Magical Realism, Plane Crash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-04
Updated: 2019-07-04
Packaged: 2020-06-03 17:40:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19468882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThirtySixSaveFiles/pseuds/ThirtySixSaveFiles
Summary: A bright star moves overhead the night the boy is born, one that shines more brightly than the rest. Scientists marvel over this unusual astronomical activity, and looking through their telescopes name it Asteroid B-612. Far below, his parents name the boy Ren.When Ren is six, he draws many pictures. One of the pictures he draws is of a black bird, and after he draws this picture he draws the bird again, and again, until his mother finally takes notice and asks why on earth he wants to draw anything as ordinary as a crow over and over again.“This isn’t a crow,” he tells her. “This is a friend.”A Persona 5 retelling of The Little Prince, for the Persona 5 Storybook zine "Tales From the Velvet Room."





	what makes the desert beautiful

**Author's Note:**

> This story was written for and published in the Persona 5 Storybook zine "Tales From the Velvet Room" (also known as the Persona 5 Fairytale Project), which was produced in spring 2019. This book had a limited production run, so now that the project has come to a close I'm posting here to AO3!

A bright star moves overhead the night the boy is born, one that shines more brightly than the rest. Scientists marvel over this unusual astronomical activity, and looking through their telescopes name it Asteroid B-612. Far below, his parents name the boy Ren.

When Ren is six, he draws many pictures. One of the pictures he draws is of a black bird, and after he draws this picture he draws the bird again, and again, until his mother finally takes notice and asks why on earth he wants to draw anything as ordinary as a crow over and over again.

“This isn’t a crow,” he tells her. “This is a friend.”

She doesn’t understand, which is disappointing but not unusual. In his six years on Earth Ren has found that adults - even his parents - have rarely understood the things he’s tried to tell them.

When he is sixteen Ren learns to fly a plane. This is, perhaps, not the most ordinary of activities for a sixteen-year-old, but Ren is far from an ordinary boy. Oh, he does well in school and his teachers have no complaints...except that Ren has few, if any, friends, and will often spend class gazing out the window, lost in thought, staring at the sky. If Ren is asked about this behavior he will reply distractedly that he’s looking for something. If pressed, he’ll come back to himself and say that he was just daydreaming.

He never tells the adults what he’s looking for. He knows they wouldn’t understand. He hardly understands himself, but he knows that he has to keep looking.

So when he turns sixteen Ren convinces his parents to let him take aviation lessons. This is not hard; his parents are peripherally involved in his life at best, and are easily swayed by the argument that this will look good when college entrance applications roll around.

It will, but that’s not why Ren does it. He does it because when he’s in the air, closer to the sky than he’s ever been, he feels as if the thing he’s been looking for all his life is closer as well.

This is all well and good until the day Ren is up in the air, flying a lazy practice route that takes him far from the coastal town he calls home, when his engine suddenly sputters.

That is not a good sound.

The controls jerk in Ren’s hands and he fights for command of the plane as it veers toward the earth like it’s suddenly remembered that it’s 5,000 kg of steel and aluminum and has no business being in the sky. The plane rolls even as Ren tries to hold it steady, spiralling down and down toward the earth. At the last minute, Ren manages to level it out and the landing is still a landing and not a crash, although only by the barest of margins. Ren stares at his hands, wrapped white-knuckled around the pilot’s yoke, and concentrates on breathing and the fact that he still can.

When his heartbeat slows and the rushing in his ears has receded he looks up, out the cockpit windows, and is greeted by -

A desert, stretching toward the horizon as far as he can see.

Ren’s breath catches again. There are no deserts near where he lives.

He unstraps himself from the pilot’s seat, clambering through the small aircraft to the door where he lets himself down into fine, yellow sand that swirls around his boots, lifted by the wind. He takes a few steps away from his plane and crouches down. The sand feels real enough, warm and faintly gritty when he rubs it between his fingers. When he looks back the way he came there’s no sign of the town he came from, no sign of civilization at all: no cell phone towers, no power lines, just the endless desert, stretching out into eternity.

“I’m glad you survived,” a voice says above him, and Ren’s head whips back around. “Could you draw me a friend?”

The voice belongs to - a boy, not much older than Ren, with soft hair and sharp eyes, dressed in the finest royal uniform Ren has ever seen. He hasn’t seen many, admittedly, but surely that’s what this is - all gold and red trimmings and the whitest fabric Ren has ever seen, unstained by the yellow of the desert sand.

“What?” Ren says. He feels he can be forgiven for being a little slow, given that he’s just crashed into a desert he’s fairly sure shouldn’t exist.

“I said.” The boy’s voice has an edge that suggests he’s not used to repeating himself and he doesn’t much like it. “Could you draw me a friend?”

Ren stands slowly. It’s been ages since he’s drawn anything with serious intention, although his school notebooks are crowded with small outlines of little black birds, scribbled idly as he whiles away the hours in class.

“I - what kind of friend?” he says cautiously. He wonders if maybe he _did_ crash after all, and this is the last hallucination of a dying brain.

The boy shrugs. “I’ll know it when I see it.” He folds his hands behind his back and looks at Ren expectantly, like this is any kind of normal request, like _anything_ about his appearance in an endless desert that can’t exist is _normal_.

The thing about _normal_ , though, is that it’s never done much for Ren.

“Sure,” he says. “Give me a minute.”

The boy waits patiently as Ren pulls his pack out of the plane, rummaging for a notebook and pen. He sits down with Ren when he takes a seat in the shade of the plane’s wing, watching interestedly as Ren puts pen to paper.

The lines come easily now, the ease of long practice making it so Ren feels he’s almost tracing an existing image rather than drawing one for the first time. In a way that might be true - he’s been drawing this bird, or one like it, since he was six, in preparation for this moment that he never could have anticipated. The lines are clean and simple, and they come together under his hand in quick, graceful harmony. When he’s done the bird looks almost as if it’s ready to fly off the page, and Ren grins at it, proud. He tears the page out of his notebook and hands it to the boy, who takes it and holds it out in front of him.

“It’s perfect,” he says with a small smile. “How did you know?”

“I think,” Ren says slowly. “I think that I’ve been looking for you my whole life. So I’ve been practicing.”

The boy looks at him sharply. “Looking for me?”

“In the sky.” Ren doesn’t know how he knows this but he knows that it’s true. “It’s why I learned to fly.”

The boy glances at Ren’s plane. “Looks like you learned the hard way, then.”

Ren wasn’t aware there _was_ any other way, but instead he says, “What’s your name?”

The boy turns back, looking Ren up and down. “You can call me Goro,” he says eventually, leaning back on his hands. The sand swirls around him but doesn’t seem to be able to touch him.

“Goro.” Ren turns the sound of it over in his mind, leaning back as well. “I’m Ren.”

“Ren.” Goro hums to himself, then sits up, carefully folding the drawing. “Tell me Ren,” he says as he stows it away inside his jacket. “Do you play?”

Ren frowns. “Play?” But Goro has already withdrawn his hand, and in it is a small flat board, about the size of a drink coaster. He turns it over in his hands one, twice, three times, and each time he turns it the board grows, until he’s holding a full-sized chess board between his hands. Goro turns it over a fourth time and the board is suddenly filled with a full complement of chess pieces, ready for play. He sets it carefully on the ground between them, and looks at Ren with a challenge in his eyes.

Ren raises his brows, pulls his legs underneath him, and leans over to move the first pawn.

The game is good, challenging in a way that pulls the corner of Ren’s mouth up and has him leaning over the board, elbows propped on his knees. Goro is a quick player, moving his pieces across the board with sure confidence and never blinking when Ren captures a pawn or a rook. Ren glances up at Goro’s face, trying to see the strategy behind those smiling eyes.

“Do you live here?” Ren asks, moving his bishop across the board. Perhaps a conversation will shake something loose.

Goro barks out a laugh. “Of course not. My planet is much - smaller.” He moves a knight to block Ren’s advance and then peers up into the sky, squinting against the midday sun.

“You’re from another planet?” It should sound absurd, but here in the middle of this impossible desert with Goro nodding matter-of-factly, it doesn’t sound strange at all. Ren moves a pawn and Goro captures it immediately.

“It’s not far from here.” Goro adds the pawn to the growing pile on his side of the board. “But it’s a little _too_ far from where I’m supposed to be.”

“And where is that?” The bishop has been left alone long enough that Ren can move the other one into place now.

Goro frowns. “I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to find out.” He moves his own bishop to counter, then pulls the drawing back out of his jacket. He unfolds it and looks at it again, tracing the lines with his fingers. “I thought a friend might help.”

Ren’s fingers pause on a rook. “I can take you,” he says in a rush. “Wherever you need to go.”

Goro glances at the plane again. “In that? Definitely not.”

Ren blows out a breath and looks away, until a touch on his arm pulls him back. “I appreciate the offer,” Goro says quietly, hand resting on Ren’s arm. “But this is something I have to do on my own.”

Ren breathes, in and out, and then nods. He had hoped - _I thought you could come back with me_ sounds suddenly ridiculous in his head, but he had hoped now that he had finally _found_ Goro, that either he could stay, or Goro would.

“It will be back, soon. My planet,” Goro says, glancing at the sky again. He sighs. “It’s a shame. I would have liked to have had more time with you.”

Ren’s heart stutters in his chest. “How long do we have?”

Goro glances back down at the board. “Not long now. But don’t worry,” he says, moving his king one space to the left. “We’ll meet again.”

Ren frowns at the board. This isn’t _fair_. He moves the last pawn into place, and tips over Goro’s king. “Checkmate.”

There’s a breathy laugh across from him, and then a sound like the wind sighing, and when Ren looks up the spot across from him is empty, the drawing of the bird fluttering to the ground. There’s a sound like the cawing of a crow from a very great distance, then the lines of the drawing _twist_ , leaping up off of the page, and a large black bird bursts from Ren’s drawing, wings beating furiously as it flies up, up, up into the sun. Ren watches until it’s gone, and then a little while after, but the bird doesn’t reappear.

Ren looks back down, blinking away sunspots and wetness. He runs his fingers over the board. It feels real and solid under his fingers.

Ren pushes himself up, off the ground, and forces himself to check over his plane. He inspects it from nose to tail, but apart from a few scratches he can’t find any real damage. He pauses before climbing back inside, eyes going to the chessboard sitting abandoned on the ground.

Then he lets himself back down, and carefully packs away the board and the pieces into his bag.

When he goes to turn the engines back on they purr immediately to life, as if there had been no interruption. Taking off from sand is a bit difficult, but he manages, and before long he’s back in the sky, navigating back toward what he thinks is the way he came. The sky feels lonely, lonelier than it ever has before, but when he glances over at the chessboard sticking out of his pack Ren hears Goro’s voice echoing in his head.

_We’ll meet again._ Ren hopes it’s true.

One week turns into two turns into three, and although Ren flies every chance he gets, he never finds the desert again. He circles the lake and then the forest for what seems like hours, but the terrain refuses to give way to a vast expanse of sand. A bright star burns in the sky when it gets dark, and the newscasters have stories every night of a rare asteroid returned to the Earth’s orbit, but Ren pays them little mind. He takes to carrying the chessboard with him, even to school. It’s a comfort, to feel the sharp edges of the board underneath his arm; it reminds him that it wasn’t all a dream. On Sundays he sets up the board at a table in the park, moving the pieces on both sides himself. It’s not as good as playing Goro, but it’s better than nothing.

He’s just about got himself in checkmate on the fourth Sunday after he’d crashed in the desert when a large black bird lands on the table across from him. It caws - once, twice, three times as Ren watches, before knocking the white king over with its beak and taking off again. Ren is still staring - he’d been three moves away from check against the white side, but he doesn’t know how a crow could _know_ \- when there’s a muffled chuckle from behind him.

“I see you’ve been practicing,” a voice says, and Ren whirls around.

Goro - _Goro_ is standing behind him, with his soft hair and his sharp eyes, out of his royal attire but no less resplendent in a school uniform Ren recognizes from the next town over. As Ren gapes Goro shifts a briefcase from one hand to the other and gestures at the seat opposite Ren.

“May I?” Ren nods dumbly, and Goro smiles and sits.

“I have to thank you,” he says, righting the white king. “Without you I think I might have been trapped there quite a bit longer.”

“How - what -” Ren doesn’t know exactly what he’s asking, but Goro seems to understand anyway.

“I thought the friend was the key,” he says, capturing one of Ren’s pawns. “And I was half right. The drawing was enough to get me back home.”

Ren moves his knight and thinks about the asteroid that’s been in the news, about small planets, about the starlight that filters into his bedroom at night.

“But as it turns out,” Goro continues, countering Ren’s knight with his own, “the drawing wasn’t the friend at all.”

Ren’s breath stills as Goro reaches out, putting his hand over Ren’s.

“I’m sorry it took me so long,” he says quietly. “But I’m here now.”

Then his hand lifts up, and knocks over Ren’s king.

“Checkmate,” he says with a grin. “Shall we play again?”

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me at [ThirtySixSaveFiles](https://thirtysixsavefiles.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr or [@36SaveFiles](https://twitter.com/36SaveFiles) on Twitter!


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